Hearing in Robbe-Grillet

Ae-Young Choe, Le voyeur à l’écoute. Paris: P.U.F., “Le texte rêve,” 1996. 128 pp.

More than forty years after the publication of Le voyeur, Alain RobbeGrillet’s strange imaginary world continues to fascinate his readers. In Le voyeur à l’écoute, Ae-Young Choe undertakes to imitate the venture of the psychoanalyst. While all the signs seemed to indicate that Le voyeur would enter the annals of literature as the roman de la vue, Choe shifts the focus to the world of listening. Roland Barthes (1955: 826), one of the first commentators on Robbe-Grillet, already saw that the novelist’s writing went beyond encompassing the link between the signifier and the signified: Le voyeur “foregrounds . . . a deconditioning of the reader in relation to the essentialist art of the bourgeois novel.” Currently, art’s antibourgeois engagement has become less virulent, and the then revolutionary procedures adopted by the first of the new novels has managed to reeducate part of the public. Barthes’s hypothesis, however, still holds in that Robbe-Grillet’s writing ensures the survival of this “deconditioning” in the position language holds in relation to itself. In fact, ambiguity, which works on the margins of language, is always poised to create new signifying constellations. Free of exterior ties, resistant to the attribution of a preconstructed meaning, the signs configured by Robbe-Grillet reactivate themselves with every new act of reading.

As if in response to Barthes’s premise, Choe directs the analysis of Le voyeur toward hearing and reveals to us the “clef musicale” (5) of a work punctuated by the rumbling of the unconscious, which can be heard in the interstices of a fragmentary and declining vision. It is not, however, a matter of reversing the sensory hierarchy, by which hearing would take precedence over viewing, but rather one of emphasizing the aporetic alternation of the two senses that, from the very first line, marks the writing of the novel: “C’était comme si personne n’avait entendu.” This opening phrase of Le voyeur, Choe affirms, expresses a paradox to which one does not pay enough attention. The narrative, whose title signals the presence of sight, begins with a remark about hearing, if only to invoke a kind of silence: to say that there is nothing already situates it in the world of listening (5). Thus, hearing takes over meaning when vision has broken down: the shift from eye to ear allows a reality to emerge that is articulated in terms of murmuring, of hubbub, of silence. In formulating the unspoken element of the unconscious, the critic lends support to those who, earlier, intuited the episodic quality of absence (see Bernal 1964) in the novels of Robbe-Grillet.

According to Choe, Le voyeur has two intersecting paths that bespeak the word of the unconscious. Both are eventually worked into the emblematic flat figure eight, the sign of infinity, translating the gap where language opens up to other areas of significance. One form of inscribing absence through hearing has to do with repetition and tends to promote the recollection of a childhood memory anchored in a latent primal scene; the other, working through distortion and erasure, will evoke the scene of a crime that has gone unmentioned. One of the central ideas to emerge from this study is that the readability of the text depends on the sole condition that we connect the two modes of reading—the one through which the written letter draws the eye, the other centered on the attraction silence exerts on the ear—so that the audible will repair the deficiencies of the visual.

This is especially true of the first path, which leads to the reconstitution of a primal scene from sound effects that have no visual support. The reading of the listening shows that when it is transmitted by the voice of the Other (“On lui avait souvent raconté cette histoire” [9]), the childhood memory that haunts Mathias cannot be accessed...